Interview and cover illustration by Shanita Lyn.

When we talk about curiosity, there is a tendency to dismiss it as a trait inherent in precocious children, or people who meddle in affairs they have no business in. Sometimes it’s regarded as a nice quirk to have — in theory, but not so much in practice. It is, after all, disruptive to question our established system and ways of doing things. How does this work? What if we tried something different? Does it have to be done this way? Most of all, why, why, why?

But curiosity is far more than child’s play. PROFESSOR VICKNES WARAN, senior consultant neurosurgeon at both University Malaya Medical Centre (UMMC) and University Malaya Specialist Centre (UMSC), can attest to that.

Professor Vicknes, fondly known as Prof Vicky, is a wearer of many, many hats — “sometimes I don’t know which hat I’m bloody wearing!” he says with a laugh. In addition to his current role as senior consultant neurosurgeon in both the private and public wings of University Hospital (UH), he is also the medical director and interim CEO of UMSC; one of the directors of Centre for Biomedical & Technology Integration (CBMTI), a startup company within the university where he does research and development work; and, of course, a professor. And that’s just what he’s doing now. His journey has been a fascinating one, and to do justice to the full scope of it, we must start at the beginning.

Prof Vicky was born, bred and brought up in KL, “within a ten kilometre radius of University Hospital,” he says laughingly. He studied at LaSalle Brickfields for primary school, then at St John’s Institution for secondary. From a young age, his curiosity and hunger to figure things out was apparent. As a kid, he says, he was always taking things apart to see how they worked, and then wouldn’t know how to put them back together: “My father used to always say I’m bloody destructive.”

Photo by Shanita Lyn. — *Photo by* Shanita Lyn.

In fact, his first love was not medicine at all, but engineering. “I liked engineering — I always liked working with my hands. Be it Legos or Mechano or whatever else they had. My ambition in life was to be a civil engineer.” But just when he finished his STPM and the time came for him to start applying to colleges and universities, Malaysia was hit by a huge economic crisis. He was suddenly forced to reevaluate whether engineering was the right choice to make at the time, regardless of how passionate he was about it. “When I applied, I actually got offers to do civil engineering. But the joke at that point was, civil engineers were painting road curbs. And mechanical engineers were filling car tyres,” he says with a laugh. “So one of my wise uncles said to me very casually, ‘Whether the economy’s doing well or badly, people will still fall sick.’” He chuckles. “So he said, ‘Why don’t you do medicine first, and then see what happens?’ So that’s how I ended up in medicine.”

He went on to do his medical degree in University of Malaya, after a comically short-lived stint in Singapore. “So the fun part —” he says, with a glimmer in his eye, “so, when I applied for medicine, I applied to Singapore and Malaysia.” Ever known for its efficiency, Singapore was the first to offer him a spot to study medicine there. “So all things being equal, everybody said, ‘Go to Singapore, go to Singapore.’” He laughs. “So then they even gave me my farewell and bought me my suitcase and everything and put me on a train to go to Singapore. But the day before I was supposed to leave, I received the offer letter from Universiti Malaya.

“So now there was a dilemma,” he grins. “So, everybody has told me goodbye already, and said, ‘You’re going to Singapore.’ And I suppose to some extent it was the logical choice. But somewhere on the train ride between KL and Singapore — specifically in Gemas — I decided that, no, I’m going back home. Because the system here has worked for me well, all this while. So then between Gemas and Singapore I had to decide what the excuse was going to be to come back.” He laughs. “Then the moment I landed in Singapore I just called up my parents and said, ‘I’m coming back.’ Then I spent another three days in Singapore deciding what to say when I come back, to the rest of the world.

“But I have zero regrets about having come back,” he says, with feeling. “I have zero regrets. In fact I don’t think I would have achieved what I’ve done if I had gone to Singapore. And I’ve got zero regrets [about] doing medicine.”

Upon graduation, he worked in Muar, Johor and in Kuala Lumpur General Hospital (KLGH), where he went on to specialise in neurosurgery; spent four years at Cambridge in Edinburgh; and then came back to work in GH for a short period, which is where he was when opportunity came knocking. In 2001, University Hospital invited him to set up their neurosurgical unit from scratch, and the rest, as they say, is history.

On how he made the decision to specialise in neurosurgery, he says it was more a case of taking an opportunity that was in front of him rather than something he knew right away. “I figured that I wanted to do surgery, because surgery is working with your hands. And I hated reading. And I was supposed to do orthopaedic surgery, really. But there was a vacancy… because we do something called a rotation, we have to do different specialities when we’re training. So I went into neurosurgery. And neurosurgery was really hard work, because nobody really wanted to do neurosurgery. But the team worked hard and the team played hard — I liked the ‘played hard’ bit as well,” he says with a laugh. “So I decided to stick on.

“And neurosurgery was fun. Uh, okay, not, maybe, for the patients,” he adds quickly, with a laugh, “but generally neurosurgery was fun. It was sexy, it had all the fancy toys in the world. It’s always in the forefront of medicine. So this was my game.” Beyond that, he does feel that the speciality chooses the doctor, to a certain extent. “Because in some ways, I suppose it’s your character that makes you go into a certain area,” he muses. “And then sometimes it’s a certain area that forms your character. So if your character’s a certain way, you find yourself drifting in a certain direction. Then, did I choose neurosurgery, or did neurosurgery choose me? Is another question. Because the guy who becomes a surgeon is different in his thought process, [in his] thinking, than someone who did general medicine, who is different from someone who did dermatology. In surgery, the guy who does neurosurgery is different from a kind of guy who would do plastic surgery. So to some extent I think the speciality selects you. And then, of course, it starts to mould you. So you become a pain in the arse — if you’re a neurosurgeon, you become a pain in the ass,” he says with a twinkle in his eye. “You become very demanding. You think the world revolves around you, because you’re used to the world revolving around you. So it trains your character — you expect a certain degree of precision. If I want it, I want it now! Not in ten minutes’ time!” He laughs.

“Neurosurgery is a very unforgiving mistress. So she’s very alluring, very sexy, everybody thinks. But if you cross her… unforgiving. Highly unforgiving.”

But of course, the business of operating on people’s brains isn’t all fun and games and fancy toys. As Prof Vicky describes it, “Neurosurgery is a very unforgiving mistress. So she’s very alluring, very sexy, everybody thinks. But if you cross her… unforgiving. Highly unforgiving.” When your whole job involves taking responsibility for someone else’s life into your hands, you’re forced to learn how to keep your cool in even the most dire circumstances. “You know all that drama that you see about McDreamy in Grey’s Anatomy and all that? Errr, that one only drama in TV, okay?” he says. “Because you’re trained, you know? You’ve been doing this for years. You start off as the junior-most in the shit pile, as a house officer. You deal with it, and after a while you’re conditioned. I’m not gonna make it sound like an army or something, but you’re conditioned.

“Many many many years ago, when I was a junior neurosurgical registrar, I used to work with a short-tempered boss. But when the shit hit the ceiling, he was the calmest person in the world. And one day I was there assisting him when the shit hit the ceiling, and I thought, ‘Oh, crap. He’s gonna start shouting and yelling at this point.’ And actually everything became very serene and quiet. And then the problem got dealt with. Then he turned around and looked at me [and said], ‘You expected me to shout, right?’” He laughs. “So it’s pointless, when things go wrong, to get angry. That’s the wrong time. You can scream and yell at people for doing stupid things after the situation is settled, but not at the time of the situation. So you will learn how to be Zen. You have to learn how to be Zen.”

It’s this ability to be truly Zen when everything around you is going wrong, he says, that makes the difference between a good surgeon and a truly great surgeon. “A great surgeon — there’s usually no drama in theatre. Every operation looks as boring as the next operation. Another great surgeon that I worked with in my life [said] all operations, no matter how complex, should be reduced to five steps. Then there’s a surgeon who said, ‘Never lose your cool.’ And you must always think about the problem. Every case that you do, you will often hear people [say], ‘Oh, that’s a simple case, you know, it’s routine, run-of-the-mill…’ In neurosurgery I always say there’s no run-of-the-mill case. Even if you have done it a hundred times, the hundred and first time may prove to be a curveball. So you need to think about what it is that you’re doing and reflect back on it. So if something goes wrong — even if something goes right, you need to wonder, why did it go right this time? Or why did it go wrong that time?”

This spirit of constant questioning, coupled with a healthy dose of fear, is what keeps him on his toes and prevents him from becoming too complacent in his work. Because after all these years, nothing changes the fact that taking someone else’s life into your hands at such a critical level is scary work. “Whenever I’m going to do a big case — and that’s, like, maybe two or three times a week — it’ll scare me,” he says. “We’ve come a long way, but the room for error is actually quite small. Very small. I mean, we are trained, it’s routine, we do it a certain way and all that, right? But sometimes, something will go wrong. And when that something goes wrong, the difference you’re gonna make to that person’s life is going to be huge. So every case I do scares me to some extent, and I think that is good. It keeps that edge sharp. It should not become a routine.”

His innate curiosity, which the years have done nothing to diminish, serves him well in this regard. “Oh, it’s a huge thing,” he says of the role curiosity plays in his work and his life. “It’s all the time. I’m curious about everything. So if something happens, if someone does something, there’s a process, I wanna know why. Which annoys a lot of people — why. So, in medicine and in grown-up life, there are a lot of routines. People will tell you you have to follow this route because this is what [is done]. I’ll ask why. If someone wants me to do something, if someone wants me to implement a new rule or something, I will wanna know: why? Is this the best way to do it? Do we really have to do it? Because I think in life we do a lot of things because we are told to do it. We’re expected to do it. We never question. And I think it’s important to question.”

This philosophy doesn’t just apply to how he lives his own life, but also to how he leads his team. “I tell my team, ‘Sometimes my problem with management style is I let you all question too much.’” He chuckles. “But if you’re not allowed to question, or if you don’t question, then you’re never gonna move forward, you’re not gonna find the best solution. Sometimes it takes a long time. Sometimes it’s bloody annoying. But it’s interesting to know why.” He’s the sort of doctor who encourages his patients to ask informed questions, too. “I have a lot of colleagues who don’t like to be questioned. Be it patients or be it their own colleagues, whatever. But I tell my patients — and this is real,” he says with a chuckle. “I said, if you’re gonna buy a car that’s gonna cost RM80,000, you would go and have a look at a second car, third car, get [another] opinion, right? Now, if someone tells you they wanna do an operation on you that’s gonna cost RM50,000 and more, and it may have serious repercussions on your life, don’t you think you need to find out a second opinion?” Most of the time, as long as the patient or family is polite and reasonable in the way they ask their questions, he’s happy to sit and answer as many as they have. “I’d rather have a patient who is informed when I knife them than someone who says, ‘Takpe lah (never mind).’”

“I think in life we do a lot of things because we are told to do it. We’re expected to do it. We never question. And I think it’s important to question.”

Of course, a sense of curiosity this strong wasn’t going to stay limited to one field of interest forever, as fascinating as neurosurgery may be. Luckily for both Prof Vicky and us, his long-held passion for engineering and technology would come to find expression through his work with CBMTI. “So, I like devices, I like tools,” he says gleefully. “So it all comes back to the same thing — [you] think about what you do in the operation, right? So you will see things that you don’t like, [and that] you like. And so you design around it, and then you develop tools and devices. And that’s how the engineering part started to come out.” Over the years, his team has published a number of papers which are changing the game in the medical industry around the world. For example, back in the year 2000, before the advent of WhatsApp and smartphones, they were among the first to validate sending images via mobile devices as a tool to help doctors make diagnoses remotely. “You know, we used to, at night, when I was on call — the juniors will always call you and they will describe things to you on the phone. So can you imagine someone describing a picture to you? And then try understanding what the picture looks [like]. So if I describe [something] to you on the phone, at two o’ clock in the afternoon, and then I do that again at two o’ clock in the morning and I’ve just woken you up from sleep…” He pauses for emphasis. “And you’re trying to figure out what [it] actually looks like, and then you’re gonna make some decisions on this, on the phone. And that’s how we were doing it.

“So one of the research papers that we did and we published was, we validated that if you send an image by mobile device, I can make a diagnosis. And that was accepted. And I’m sure people had done it before me, but we validated it. And we validated it again when JPEG came.” It seems commonplace today, but considering the fact that this paper came out in the era of SMS and MMS, several years prior to the advent of the first real smartphone, this was a big deal. By the time the first iPhone came out several years later and CNN did a segment on how its image sharing capabilities would make a huge difference in the medical industry, the idea was already old news to Prof Vicky’s team. “I was there in the operating theatre [when the segment aired], and one of my trainees there — who’s a consultant now — said, ‘Just because they’ve not read our paper which we published.’” He laughs. “So I felt quite proud, you know? That my trainee thought that we had done something useful!”

One of their more recent innovations, which gained a lot of attention both in medical journals and in the popular press, was their work in using 3D printing to create models of real-world cases, allowing trainees to practice and perfect all manner of procedures before ever touching a real patient — much like a pilot going through flight simulators before actually flying a plane. “We were covered around the world,” Prof Vicky says with pride. “We were covered in the New Scientist, we have a YouTube video… My wife used to laugh and say, ‘Oh, you’re like Justin Bieber,’ because I had 22,000 hits or something in a matter of, like, two weeks,” he says laughingly. But it didn’t stop there — “first it came out in a medical journal, and then it was picked up by various popular press [including CNBC]. And then it was picked up by an engineering journal, and an engineering magazine, and it came out on the cover. [And I was like,] ‘We have arrived.’” He chuckles.

Another issue he’s keen to help resolve through his engineering work is the accessibility to proper healthcare in rural or more remote areas, through the use of telemedicine. “For example, if you look at this COVID thingy that’s going on, we knew that technology in medicine was going to blow, some more. Especially the IT part of it. So I think there are problems there that we can solve. Important issues in telemedicine, important issues in getting consultation, important issues in rural health, see? So, you are in KL, right? You can see a doctor any time — you can walk into a hospital like this and you’ve got all the facilities available. But let’s say if you’re out in the sticks somewhere, the person you see will most likely not even be the person who’s gonna be able to deal with your problem. So we need to be able to solve that kind of problem. How do you manage patients long distance? How do you manage patients at night? How do you manage patients who can’t afford things? How do you manage patients who are slightly more remote? So that’s all engineering, technology kinda questions.”

The team at UMSC has been looking into an effective solution to this problem for years, but development kicked into high gear back in March when the Movement Control Order (MCO) was implemented to curb the spread of COVID-19. The result of that concentrated effort was the development of the MedCom remote sensor suite, a pair of “smart glasses” which would allow senior doctors to observe and supervise operations and make diagnoses without being physically present. This technology would tackle the issue of healthcare in rural areas, and also makes it easier to monitor COVID patients in isolated wards more closely without compromising on the strict standard operating procedures that are in place. Kinda like playing a VR game, but in real life and ten times cooler.

He finds the engineering aspect of his work so fun that he doesn’t even really think of it as work at all. “I suppose it’s an escape,” he says. “An escapism from the hard life of surgery. A bit more playful, related to the not-so-playful bit. But I was also fortunate that I was in an environment that allowed me to play while I work. So when I work, I don’t look at it as ‘work.’ I look at much of it as play. So [that’s] what wakes me up in the morning, because a lot of it’s fun. It’s exciting. So believe it or not, Universiti Malaya is actually an exciting place! It gives you the opportunity to do different things. It’s just a case of whether you wanna pick up the baton and run with it or not.”

“When I work, I don’t look at it as ‘work.’ I look at much of it as play. So that’s what wakes me up in the morning, because a lot of it’s fun. It’s exciting.”

As much fun as he has at work, though, there are a couple of other things he’s just as passionate about that have nothing to do with his medical or engineering career. One of those things is music, which he absolutely cannot live without. “I like music,” he says. “I like music a lot. The best discovery I made in my life was Spotify. So when no one’s at home, the TV will be on Spotify. When I’m gonna go to bed, it’s the headphones, it’s on Spotify.” He even used to play the piano and saxophone — “used to,” he emphasises — and sang in his school choir back in the day. These days, he’s more of a listener than a musician himself, but an enthusiastic one nonetheless. His music of choice? “Who, me? You’d be surprised,” he says cheekily. “I can listen all the way from Bach and Mozart to Britney Spears and Gwen Stefani. My wife was horrified when I said, ‘Shall we go and watch Gwen Stefani in Singapore?’” He laughs. “So I can listen to bands like Oasis, and I can listen to Mozart, and Josh Groban, and Buble, and Sinatra, and I can listen to Indian classical… so the range is very wide. To some of the newer — I can’t remember the names, but some of the new groups. But recently the music has been shit, the last one month. The new ones that are on [the radio] are like—” he makes a kind of retching sound. “Okay, now I must be getting really old!” He reveals that he also likes to have music playing in theatre while operating, but keeps his choices in that setting rather tame. “I always play Light & Easy [FM]. You know why? So that it doesn’t offend anybody else,” he says with a laugh. “I’ve worked with surgeons who like hard rock in theatre, and I myself wouldn’t mind having classical. But that’ll bore the remaining nine other people who might be in theatre, so we listen to Light & Easy. So everybody’s okay.” He laughs gleefully.

He’s also an avid reader, and will read everything from fiction to nonfiction to the back of a cereal box. This love of books and reading dates back to his childhood. “I was very fortunate — my grandparents owned a bookshop, it used to be called Federal Book Centre. And so I used to go for music classes — my father would drop me off, and then I’d go for class, and then I’d go there and spend the rest of the day sitting in the shop. And I just read and read and read. So you develop a very vivid imagination,” he says cheekily. “And my parents — bless them — even though I don’t think they could really afford it that much, whenever we wanted a book, they always bought [it]. They never said no. So I’m very grateful for that.” These days it’s difficult to get him to stop buying books. “I discovered that you can get Amazon Kindle on your Android phone. So I’ve started buying, and my wife said, ‘Don’t buy more. Don’t buy so many books. This house is full of books that you don’t read!’” He laughs.

“The other thing I love is Flipboard,” he continues. “You can read all kinds of rubbish you wanna read.” Out of curiosity, we ask him what this “rubbish” he speaks of might include. He gets out his phone. “Let’s see… my categories on Flipboard are: so I’ve got news (UK edition); technology; Twitter and Facebook — I didn’t put them there, they came by themselves; design; business (UK edition); travel; auto; science; history; Business Insider; big ideas; I don’t know why I’ve got personal organising in there, which I never read; corporate finance — I also like finance. I like finance, I like business… Nanotech — that I think looks good, that’s why it’s there; physics — which I don’t read; culture (UK); ancient history; aviation history; Volvo,” — he shrugs — “solar power; 3D printing; wine; music; tech; gear; internet; and innovation.” Phew!

Noticing his special mention of finance and business, I ask what it is about those fields that intrigues him. “So, when you’re a neurosurgeon, you think that the world revolves around you,” he says with a grin. “And then suddenly you realise that actually you are the planet Pluto and beyond. The world doesn’t revolve around you. The world actually revolves around high finance. Because that’s the engine that keeps the world going. Whether we like it or not, if you wanna do anything good, you need to have finance. You need to have money. You need to have business that drives it. So it’s interesting to know how these things work. Very important.”

So important, in fact, that he’s keen to start a program at the university called The Business of Medicine. “We all spend time in medicine, we learn everything on medicine,” he explains. “Ninety percent of us will become private practitioners at some point in time, or we’ll be involved in running businesses or all that. But nobody actually tells us how to do it. And finance is very, very important.” He believes that instilling a solid understanding of finance and business from the beginning will prevent good doctors from making bad decisions further down the line. “I think sometimes people do a lot of, shall we say, unethical, unscrupulous things — maybe they go down that pathway because they get it wrong. They don’t think about the money [when they start out]. A lot of people say, ‘Oh, money is the root of all evil.’ No it’s not! It’s not. If you don’t know how to do it, then…. You mustn’t let greed overtake you,” he continues, “and you must know that there’s ethics. So we have ethics in medicine, but ethics in medicine is like how you make sure you don’t do wrong things to the patients. But there’s also ethics about how you charge patients, ethics about how — You know, medicine is a business, to some extent. So we do private practice, right? It’s a business! It is a business. People pay for it, you charge people for it. So, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, but I think it needs to be done in the correct way. And I think medical students should be taught in the beginning, the ethics, the business of medicine.”

This keen sense of business acumen serves him in good stead in his current role as interim CEO of UMSC, further diversifying his portfolio and adding to his already busy schedule. How on earth, one may ask, does he juggle all of these roles? He laughs — we’re not the first to ask him this question. What he has found works best for him, though, is structuring his time in such a way that allows for both consistency and variation. “I’m a creature of habits,” he says. “So there must be a certain structure. I must kinda wake up at a certain time; I must be able to sit down and have my little me-time; at night, I must be able to end the day by reading in peace and listening to some music. And then in the middle, you know, it’s mayhem. So there must be some element of structure.” On a weekly basis, he sticks to the same schedule he’s maintained in the close-to-twenty years he’s been at the university. “Every Tuesday, I’ll be in theatre. Almost everybody knows where to find me. Every Monday afternoon, if I don’t have something else, I will be in my public clinic. Every Wednesday morning I will be in my private clinic. And I hate when my schedule is made to be changed. Like, that annoys me, big time.”

Paradoxically, it’s this consistency and structure that allows him to devote the necessary time to each of his various roles and interests. “Medicine allows you to do different things,” he says. “So in a week, even though I said to you I compartmentalise my life, I wouldn’t do the same thing every day. So I could be treating a patient; I could be in a clinic talking to patients; I could be in theatre operating on patients, which is completely different; I could be meeting my research team, and planning and doing research work and discussion; and then equally I also do medical legal work, and I could be dealing with lawyers and discussing problems and writing opinions and reports; I could switch channel and I could be — what else could I be? Oh ya — I could be an administrator, dealing with finance and business plans, and so I’ve got bits of economy, a bit of finance, a bit of medicine, a bit of surgery… and a lot of bullshit.” He laughs. “So it’s quite exciting. It is hard work, maybe reduced social life,” he laughs again, “but it’s fun.”

And that’s really it, isn’t it? The real secret to doing and having it all — is having fun. “I honestly think that all of us actually have the time,” he says matter-of-factly. “It is just a case of how you prioritise. And, most importantly, you must enjoy what you’re doing. If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, then you bitch and you don’t wanna do it,” he says with a laugh. “Whatever you enjoy doing, you will just find the time to do it.”

“I honestly think that all of us actually have the time. Whatever you enjoy doing, you will just find the time to do it.”

BRAZEN QUESTIONS

At the end of each interview, we ask our guests a series of BRAZEN questions about what inspires them, in the hope that you will be inspired, too.

What makes you want to get out of bed in the morning?

“Because the dogs bark like crazy and they might poop. So I’d better get up and make sure we get them all out quickly. That’s the primary reason. [laughs] But the reason to want to get out of bed is, the work that you do must be interesting enough to wanna get out of bed. And my work is, so. I’m not just saying it. [chuckles]”

Who inspires you?

“So, when you become a professor, you have to do something called a Syarahan Perdana (Inaugural Lecture). We will invite our family, friends, university and all that. You put your monkey suit on and robes and all, and then you’re given an hour to talk about the work that you have done — pontificate. So, when I spoke, of course I spoke about innovation. So in that, I chose to thank all the people that took me through my life. So it’s not just one person. There were many, many, many, many, many people. And I believe — I think that we are a sum total of the people we come in contact with. So many people mould you. So it’s not a singular person. Different people have inspired me for different things.”

Who inspires you to be better?

“Wah, that’s so deep. This is the part — the questions that you asked, I don’t know how to answer them! ‘What inspires you?’ God. That’s what you’re supposed to answer, right? ‘God inspires me.’ ‘My mother.’ ‘My children.’ It’s all bullshit, right?

“We’ll do the cliches la, you know — my students, my trainees, my patients. But I think it’s just curiosity sometimes. The more someone tells me that that cannot be done, the more it must be done.

“Fame and glory. Yeah! Fame and glory. Someone once asked, ‘Would you go for money, or fame and glory?’ I said I’d go for fame and glory because usually money will follow fame and glory, but not necessarily the other way round. So… it’s, like, doing something that nobody else has done. And then asking yourself, ‘If that’s so easy, why didn’t someone figure out about it?’ Right? It’s something different. To do something that nobody else has done. It’s nice when you do something that has not been done, or has not frequently been done.

“The other thing I believe is, we walk through this world once — make sure we leave our bloody mark. It sounds so cliche to say it, it’s embarrassingly cliched. But we should!”

When do you feel most alive?

“I think it’s when you are driving a project. And the project can be many different shapes and forms. And then one day, you can sit back and say, look, it worked. And it proved a million people wrong. In your face! [laughs] Yeah, I think so. In your face. [chuckles]”

So the "in your face" moment is when you feel most alive?

“Ya, yes! [laughs]”

As a doctor, you often see people at difficult and scary times in their lives. What has that taught you about people and life as a whole?

“Oh. Yeah, don’t take life for granted. Because it can just turn overnight. I suppose most of my training was, like, what I call high-intensity medicine. Major trauma, cancerous tumours… So I was always in action units like orthopaedic surgery, general surgery, neurosurgery. So sometimes we’ll be treating a patient who — you can imagine that he would have been leaving home this morning. He would have said goodbye to his mother or wife or girlfriend or children or whatever, and the next call they’re getting is, ‘So-and-so has had a road traffic accident or a haemorrhage in the brain and he’s fighting for his life.’ And so it must be quite… disturbing, and that’s — you will have to learn how to deal with it. And no matter how difficult patients and their relatives can be, you have to — I suppose you learn to put yourself in their shoes and try and empathise. It is not easy. It is not easy. But, you know, when things turn out well, everybody’s happy… Yeah. That’s the difficult bit.

“But at the same time that leaves me very blasé in other ways, right? [chuckles] So when people complain to me about their problems — such as one’s wife [laughs] — I will say, like, ‘Hmm, it’s not exactly the end of the world.’ You know? So sometimes it can be quite irritating. Because sometimes a leaking pipe or a lightbulb that’s not working is, like, a big problem. And people don’t like it being said that it’s not the end of the world. [laughs] So you become quite flippant about other things. That’s not good. [laughs] For me it’s like, ‘Aiya, small thing la,’ you know?”

What’s your proudest achievement, in work and in life?

“I’m not dead yet, so it’s too early to give a comment now! [laughs]

“It’s very pretentious, isn’t it? ‘What’s your proudest achievement?’ There are many things! Well, for a start, my biggest edifice — I built the division of neurosurgery. And, you know, from a hospital which had no services, or surgeons who came and went — because neurosurgeons are highly sought after in the private sector — we have a unit that consists of eight consultant neurosurgeons today. And every one of them — bar the youngest two, because they’ve just come out — are leaders in their own field. So not only do we have a neurosurgical team here, we have a team that is world class. You may not know it, people may not know it, but that team is actually world class. [Editor’s note: You can hear how fiercely proud he is of his team in the way he talks about them, and it’s so inspiring.] So I can take this entire team, and I can plant them in any unit in the world, and they will still be regarded as, ‘Wow.’ And the unit has become bigger than me. So that’s one achievement that I’m very proud of.

“Then we have the most state-of-the-art operating theatre in this country. Again, you won’t know about, and which everybody said we won’t be able to do. It’s done by a private-public partnership — high finance, right? So we have that, and that’s why this team stays with this unit, because they have all these fancy toys that they can play with, right? So those are some things.

“The stuff that we have done in R&D — hey, we were covered in the New Scientist. We were covered in CNBC. A Malaysian research team! I was quite chuffed at that point in time. And I had 22,000 hits on YouTube. [laughs]

“And, you know, when we did this 3D printing thing I was telling you about, what happened was… I wanted to get [the paper] in a very good, reputable neurosurgical journal — I come from Malaysia mah. Where is that? So, I’ve developed some good friends, so I got the team from Oxford involved in this. So we did all the work, we did all the research and all that. So they flew down and validated the kind of work we did, and we published and put their names on the paper — University of Malaya, University of Oxford. So the paper was accepted for publication. Not only was it accepted for publication — the American Association for [the Advancement of] Science wanted to embargo the paper. And in America, what they do is, if you have a very interesting paper — there’ll be a bunch of papers that they will select out of all the various journals that come out in the world, and then what they do is they will release it to the popular press. And they will do the writeup for you, and all that.

“So there was this lady that I was communicating with in the US, and she wanted a bit of information on all this. And then when she wrote the article, she said, ‘The team from University of Oxford and Malaysia.’ I was like, fuck you! This is not the University of Oxford! This is the University of Malaya! So I called her up late that night to speak to her, and I said to her, look, all this work was done here. But we have to latch on to Oxford so that the paper is given the due credit. So I said, it’ll matter more to my country and my university than to Oxford, you know? So she said, ‘Oh, I understand, sir,’ and then she changed the blurb. So I was proud of that. ‘In your face,’ again! [laughs]”

Is there anything in particular, then, that you think more people should know about and would like to draw some attention to?

“We can be here all day. [laughs] There’s always gonna be something that people don’t know about.

“I have a big chip on my shoulder — everybody feels that Singapore is better than us. Bullshit! We do things here as good as, if not better than them. They say that, you know, ‘Oh, the West is better.’ No it’s not! I worked in Cambridge, centre of the academic universe. They were as stupid as we are. They’re just better funded and better managed than we are. And if we were better managed and better funded, we can be equally as good as them.

“A lot of my team members here are very under the radar. But I think that comes from my training and upbringing. If it’s gonna be recognised, it’s gonna be recognised. We’re not gonna put it on bloody Facebook. So the stiff British upper lip comes in. Which sometimes doesn’t work to our advantage, because I think you need to beat your drum a bit. But you know, I’ve really… I am happy in my little place.”

Do you feel having a diverse range of interests has helped make you a better doctor?

“Absolutely. You must be interested, right? You must be interested in things, in people. I always find it fascinating — you see, the difference between public practice and private practice — other than [that] one makes you happy and rich and the other one you have to work like a dog, [laughs] is that — the sad thing about public practice is, because you’re forced to see many patients, you don’t actually get time to talk to people. The main reason people wanna [go to] private practice is they want you to hold their hand and talk to them. Most people who are sick, they want you to hold their hand and talk to them. That’s it. So when you talk to people, you meet lots and lots of interesting people. And it’s fascinating when you actually talk to them.”

What are some personal traits that have helped you in your work, and what are some traits you’ve gained through your work?

“I’m too old to remember. [laughs] I think a personal trait is probably perseverance. Perseverance, and not taking no for an answer. And I think my parents were pretty good, they almost never said no to us for most things.

“So the work itself — I suppose ‘success breeds success.’ So in 2005 or 2007, when we published about our first invention — and this was published in the Journal of Neurosurgery, which is the top rate neurosurgical rank, Tier 1 — and when they accepted this paper, I was so excited. I was thrilled to bits with it. When the paper actually came out, and I was holding it in my hand, and I looked at it, I said, ‘Is this my final five minutes of glory?’ And it was like a massive deflation. But it wasn’t. And it’s ‘success breeds success.’ You did it once, so you go and look for the next mountain to climb. It becomes addictive. And to be able to do that, you need to be curious. You need to be able and willing to take the bloody risk. And you need to be thick-faced enough when people say to you, ‘I told you so.’ So when you succeed, you can tell them, ‘In your face.’ [laughs]”

B.

Photo by Shalina May. — *Photo by* Shalina May.

IN CONVERSATION WITH Professor Vicknes Waran